The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin  . By CharlesFoster . Nashville , TN : Thomas Nelson, Inc. , 2010 . 240 pages. $14.99.

Charles Foster, Oxford fellow and practicing barrister, confidently wades into topics for which he has had no formal academic training—medical ethics, the evidence for Jesus, origins and neuroscience of religion. Here, he attacks Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) as an extreme, Fundamentalized ultra‐Darwinist (UD) on the “jack‐booted fringe of evolutionary biology.” But he also promises, “This book will have something in it to frustrate and annoy everyone.” It certainly will annoy the Creationists. He blithely vaults from the biology of cephalopod eyes (octopus, squid) to a discussion of the Tree of Life in Genesis, where he rejects mechanical interpretations, and sketches out scenarios that would make many dead theologians writhe in their graves.

The UD controversy with the Creationists ultimately turns on the power of natural selection—Darwin's fecund insight that individuals who are better adapted to their environment tend to leave more offspring in coming generations. These adaptive traits grow in the population at the expense of traits that are not adaptive, eventually leading to transformation of species.

For the UDs and Dawkins, natural selection pretty much explains everything. Dawkins uses the Creationists as a foil, labeling them “spiteful old hardliners,” and complaining about the “driveling ephemera of juvenile pamphleteers.” His explanations are often persuasive—except his explanations of why nature exhibits a great deal of association, symbiosis, and apparent altruism. These “altruistic” behaviors present a serious problem, since on the face of things natural selection should be the apocalyptic monster waiting at nature's womb, ready to gobble up the infant of altruism as soon as it births. Yet, always creative, UDs have come up with three get‐out‐of jail cards—kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and group selection—all of them painting altruism as a special case of selfishness. In kin selection, the altruist benefits because he “reproduces” copies of his own genes by helping his own relatives. In reciprocal altruism, I scratch your back only because you will scratch mine. In group selection, I sacrifice for the group, but I ultimately benefit because my group dominates over other groups. Foster argues that these theories alone cannot explain all altruism, and points out that even Darwin fretted about some naturalist finding a biological adaptation in one species that altruistically benefits another species, a finding that would savage his whole theory of natural selection (Darwin loved hyperbole).

At the end of the nineteenth century, conservative Christians were more accepting of Darwin's ideas. But when their enemies began using him to attack a literal reading of the Bible, the conservatives withdrew into their fundamentalist fortress and never emerged. Today, these “Young Earthers” try to fit the appearance of life on the earth into an impossibly short timeframe, and make crapulous claims about changes in the speed of light and the pace of radioactive decay—changes that, if they had actually occurred, would forbid the rise of life on our planet and indeed, make the universe impossible. They practice the old Indian rope trick—climbing up ropes and disappearing off the tops of them. The Young Earthers have midwifed the Intelligent Design movement, whose adherents believe that some biological structures are “irreducibly complex,” and cannot have arisen by degrees through natural selection. Both the Young Earthers and Intelligent Designers reject the transformative power of natural selection, insisting that the various created species have changed little since the dawn of creation. They devoutly refrain from calling Richard Dawkins the devil incarnate, but do allow that he probably is the “handmaiden of Satan.”

For his part, Foster pronounces a pox on both their houses—the UDs who say natural selection explains everything, and the Creationists who insist that it explains nothing. Both camps, he says, hold extreme, sclerosed positions in a conflict he describes as “a war in which the principal casualty is the intellectual credibility of Christianity.” He quotes the paleontologist S.J. Gould: “What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection—when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.” His conclusion? Natural selection wields great power, but it cannot explain everything—especially, it cannot explain pervasive selflessness.

Yet, Foster fails to distinguish between social altruism and genetic altruism. The social altruist accidently benefits others while mainly benefitting himself. In contrast, the genetic altruist benefits the other while imposing a true reproductive cost on himself. Social altruism is abundant in the world; genetic altruism is rare. Natural selection by itself could never foster widespread genetic altruism. Foster needs to distinguish these two, and needs to multiply examples of genetic altruism. This would lend support to his hints that nature is lit by a light from beyond this world.